Sceptical Doubts Research Articles

Practical Reason and the Status of Moral Obligation

The power of skepticism depends on the apparent possibility of rationally asking, for virtually any kind of proposition commonly thought to be known,howit is known or what justifies believing it. Moral claims are among those commonly subjected to skeptical challenges and doubts, even on the part of some people who are not skeptical about ordinary claims regarding the external world. There may be even more skepticism about the possibility of justifying moralactions,particularly if they are against the agent's self-interest. Both problems-how to justify moral claims and how to justify moral action - come within the scope of the troubling question “Why be moral?” Even a brief response to moral skepticism should consider both kinds of targets of justification, cognitive and behavioural, and should indicate some important relations between the two types of skeptical challenge. I will begin with the cognitive case- with skepticism about the scope of theoretical reason in ethics - proceed to practical skepticism, which concerns the scope of practical reason, and then show how an adequate account of rationality may enable us to respond to moral skepticism.

God and First Person in Berkeley

Berkeley claims idealism provides a novel argument for the existence of God. But familiar interpretations of his argument fail to support the conclusion that there is a single omnipotent spirit. A satisfying reconstruction should explain the way Berkeley moves between first person singular and plural, as well as providing a powerful argument, once idealism is accepted. The new interpretation offered here represents the argument as an inference to the best explanation of a shared reality. Consequently, his use of the first person must be taken as ‘exemplary’ rather than ‘Cartesian’. This explains the freedom of movement in the text between singular and plural. However, it also reveals Berkeley as side-stepping sceptical doubt.

The theoretical diagnosis of skepticism

Radical skepticism about the external implies that no belief about the external is even prima facie justified. A theoretical reply to skepticism has four stages. First, show which theories of epistemic justification support skeptical doubts (show which theories, given other reasonable assumptions, entail skepticism). Second, show which theories undermine skeptical doubts (show which theories, given other reasonable assumptions, do not support the skeptic’s conclusion). Third, show which of the latter theories (which non-skeptical theory) is correct, and in so doing show that all of the rival theories of justification, skeptical and non-skeptical alike, are mistaken. Fourth, explain why skeptical doubts are sometimes (or sometimes merely seem) intuitive, and thereby accommodate skeptical doubts without capitulation. Michael Williams has pioneered the very idea of a theoretical reply. A theoretical diagnosis consists in just the first two stages. An adequate reply, which is correct at each stage, would rebut the skeptic entirely. Williams’ own reply, I argue, is inadequate. I offer in its place an exhaustive and accurate diagnosis of skepticism. I distinguish four kinds of skepticism and five theories of justification. I then show which theories do, and which theories do not, support which kinds of skepticism.

Skepticism and the Role of Modest Transcendental Claims

What can modest transcendental claims do against skepticism? In this paper, I examine various anti-skeptical roles for modest transcendental claims suggested by Barry Stroud, Christopher Hookway, and Robert Stern (Stern, On Kant's Response to Hume: The Second Analogy asTranscendental Argument, Clarendon Oxford Press, 1999a, Stern, Transcendental Arguments: Problems and Prospects, Clarendon Oxford Press, 1999b, Hookway, Modest Transcendental Arguments and Sceptical Doubts: A Reply to Stroud, Oxford University Press, 1999, Stroud, Kantian Argument, Conceptual Capacities, and Invulnerability, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994, Stroud, The Goal of Transcendental Arguments, Clarendon Oxford Press, 1999). I argue that contrary to what these writers suggest, modest transcendental claims do not achieve much. The strategies on offer either (i) fail to identify a clear anti-skeptical role for modest transcendental claims (Stroud), (ii) they do identify such a role, but only on the assumption that we are facing a non-standard skeptical challenge (Hookway), or (iii) the anti-skeptical strategies do successfully engage with standard forms of skeptical challenges, but they work only because of epistemological assumptions that make the transcendental claims largely redundant (Stern).

Scepticism and the Early Descartes1

For the past thirty years or so, Descartes's treatment of scepticism has become increasingly important to historians of philosophy. They have questioned the nature of Descartes's sceptical doubt, i...

LOCKE ON THE SEMANTIC AND EPISTEMIC ROLE OF SIMPLE IDEAS OF SENSATION

Abstract: This paper argues that Locke has a representative theory of sensitive knowledge. Perceivers are immediately aware of nothing but sensory ideas in the mind; yet perceivers think of real external substances that correspond to and cause those ideas, and they are warranted in believing that those substances exist (at that time). The theory poses two questions: what warrants the truth of such beliefs? What is it in virtue of which sensory ideas represent external objects and how do they make perceivers think of those objects? Both the epistemic and semantic issues need to be addressed. This paper urges that Locke's basic account of warrant is roughly reliabilist. The causal origin of sensory ideas assures that, in general, sense based beliefs are true. Locke defines the limit of this warrant by the theoretical point that we cannot discuss skeptical doubt without assuming the truthfulness of our perceptual faculty. Turning to the semantic question, the paper argues that ideas are mental modifications or entities. They are not intrinsically representative (satisfiable), but rather represent only by virtue of their causal origin. They merely “track” the presence of substances and their qualities. Ideas nevertheless prompt perceivers to think of their causes. This is roughly because sensory ideas have a specific mental role, namely, to serve as marks for distinguishing substances and their respective qualities for purposes of action. The paper suggests that, for Locke, the challenge posed by the semantic veil of ideas is to explain this externally directed marking function within bounds of his anti‐innatism. But it concludes that his answers to the twin questions fit together reasonably well.

Michel de Montaigne: accidental philosopher

Michel de Montaigne, the inventor of the essay, has always been acknowledged as a great literary figure but has never been thought of as a philosophical original. This book treats Montaigne as a serious thinker in his own right, taking as its point of departure Montaigne's description of himself as 'an unpremeditated and accidental philosopher'. Whereas previous commentators have treated Montaigne's Essays as embodying a scepticism harking back to classical sources, Ann Hartle offers an account that reveals Montaigne's thought to be dialectical, transforming sceptical doubt into wonder at the most familiar aspects of life. This major reassessment of a much admired but also much underestimated thinker will interest a wide range of historians of philosophy as well as scholars in comparative literature, French studies and the history of ideas.

Interpretation, truth, and past reality Donald Davidson meets history

This article shows that some postmodernist sceptical doubts concerning the attainability of knowledge of the past are based on an inconsistent conception of truth and objectivity. After a brief summary of the postmodernist challenge for history concentrating on four basic arguments, I will depict Donald Davidson’s conception of truth and interpretation. According to his theory of radical interpretation, the meaning of our most basic words is tied to historic situations in which a triangulation between speaker, interpreter and the world takes place. The concepts of truth and objectivity also originate in these situations. On the basis of this theory most forms of scepticism lose their force: for interpretation to take place one has to assume that the other is largely right about the world. Moreover, the community’s standards of truth and objectivity cannot be tested against a more ultimate standard. Hence it is not intelligible how the objectivity and truth of our most basic and shared beliefs – understood in a non-epistemic way – might be questioned. In the conclusion I will elaborate on the implications of Davidson’s theory for history and argue that it renders the common forms of historical scepticism implausible while supporting a ‘deflated’ historical realism and at the same time avoiding the mistakes of naïve forms of realism.

Review: Reading Hume on Human Understanding: Essays on the First Enquiry

Introduction 1. The Context, Aims, and Structure of Hume's First Enquiry 2. Two Species of Philosophy The Historical Significance of the First Enquiry 3. Empiricism about Meanings 4. Hume's Sceptical Doubts concerning Induction 5. Belief and Instinct in Hume's First Enquiry 6. Hume, Belief, and Personal Identity 7. The Idea of Necessary Connexion 8. David Hume: Objects and Power 9. Hume and Thick Connexions 10. Hume on Liberty and Necessity 11. Hume on Testimony concerning Miracles 12. Hume versus Price on Miracles and Prior Probabilities: Testimony and the Bayesian Calculation 13. Religion: The Useless Hypothesis 14. Of the Academical or Sceptical Philosphy Bibliography, Index

Strawson's Anti‐Scepticism: A Critical Reconstruction

AbstractStrawson suggests an anti‐sceptical strategy which consists in offering good reason for ignoring scepticism rather than trying to refute it, and the reason he offers is that beliefs about the external world are indispensable to us. I give an exposition of Strawson's arguments for the indispensability thesis and explain why they are not strong enough. I then propose an argument based on some of Davidson's ideas in his theory of radical interpretation, which I think can establish the indispensability thesis. Finally, I spell out the force of Strawson's anti‐sceptical strategy by arguing that we have good reason for ignoring scepticism not only because beliefs about the world are indispensable, but also because it is irrational to have both beliefs about the world and sceptical doubts.

Basic Logical Knowledge

At least some of us, at least some of the time—when not in the grip of radical sceptical doubt—are inclined to believe that we know, for example, that if we infer a conclusion from two true premises, one a conditional whose consequent is that conclusion and the other the antecedent of that conditional, then our conclusion must be true, or that we know similar things about other simple patterns of inference. If we do indeed have knowledge of this sort, it is what I mean by logical knowledge. Logical knowledge is, roughly speaking, knowledge about logic—such as knowledge that a certain principle of inference necessarily preserves truth, or that every proposition of a certain form must be true—and so is not the same thing as knowledge that is gained by using logic, i.e. inferential knowledge. That is not to say, of course, that logical knowledge can't be inferential. On the contrary, it is barely open to question that—if there is any logical knowledge at all—there is a lot of inferential logical knowledge. For example, if we know that the introduction and elimination principles for the conditional are truth-preserving, we can surely get to know, by inference, that the principle of hypothetical syllogism (i.e. transitivity of the conditional) is so too, not to mention other, less obvious and more recondite, examples of putative logical knowledge.

The Prehistory of Community Forestry in India

Liberty and forest laws are incompatible, remarked an English country vicar, speaking on behalf of villagers shut out of woodland reserved for the exclusive use of the king, in 1720.1 The history of state forestry is indeed a history of social conflict. In monarchies and in democracies, in metropolitan Europe as well as in colonial South Asia, the state management of forests has met bitter and continuous opposition. On the one side are the professional foresters who believe that timber production can be ensured only through the exclusion of humans and their animals from wooded areas; on the other, the peasants, pastoralists, charcoal ironmakers, basketweavers, and other such groups for whom access to forests and forest resources is crucial to economic survival. Environmentalists have added to the criticisms of these latter groups, charging foresters with simplifying complex ecosytems in the direction of commercially valuable but biologically impoverished monocultures. These contending parties have battled for more than two hundred years. In continental Europe, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were peppered with social protest movements against the state management of forests. These protests inspired, among other things, Karl Marx's first political writings and a memorable novel by Honore de Balzac capturing peasant hostility to forest officials.2 When the European model of strict state control over forests was exported to the colonies, the disaffected peasants and tribals responded with arson and violence. Movements over forest rights were a recurring phenomena in colonies ruled by the British, the Dutch, and the French. The conflicts persisted when the post-colonial governments of countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia followed the authoritarian model of forest management inherited from the colonizer.3 In recent decades, however, the global discourse on forestry has moved towards a more accommodationist perspective. Foresters and peasant protesters now seem to talk to, rather than talk past, each other. A willingness to listen to and at least partially incorporate the other point of view has replaced the rigid and uncompromising attitude of the past. Within the forestry profession itself, skeptics doubt the contemporary relevance of the custodial and policing approaches previously followed. A system of natural resource management crafted in absolutist and colonialist

Justice and Indeterminacy: Wordsworth's "The Borderers" and the Trials of the 1790s

MENTAL TRANSITION, THE SURPRISING, DRAMATIC MOVEMENT OF mind in which one's moral and intellectual premises no longer bear weight of external fact, mutate into quite other premises, and challenge has been thought to be one's essential character, constitutes action of Wordsworth's The Borderers. For Wordsworth it also described his mental crisis and, he believed, crisis of other young Englishmen in 1790s. Even if (or rather because) critics have not agreed on quality or direction of (is it toward or away from solitariness, toward or away from nature, toward or away from self-consciousness, self-understanding, freedom), their conflict collects considerable textual evidence for equivocal quality of transition and incertitude and lack of finality that entails. (1) Until recently, political dimension of this incertitude, always about to be recognized because of Wordsworth's own mention of French Revolution in 1842 and 1843 notes to play, has been confined mainly to considerations of Wordsworth's relationship to William Godwin or to general references to time Wordsworth spent in France and to oppressive political atmosphere he experienced in England during 1790s. In past ten to fifteen years, however, historicist endeavors have developed detail necessary to illuminate Wordsworth's own explicit connection between what I had observed of in character & reflections I had been led to make during time I was witness of changes through which French Revolution passed, (2) on one hand, and his rhetorical and dramaturgical choices in play, on other hand. (3) In this essay I plan to show how Wordsworth rhetorically emplaces several notorious legal cases of 1790s in his play, making specific crises of political justice carry explanatory weight of mental crisis and engaging epistemological implications and dramaturgical problems of representing this crisis. Studying play from this point of view raises again question of Wordsworth's relation to and view of history. Early described as poet of imagination and transcendence, in escape from history and confines of mortality, then socialized and historicized and, in sense, activated as participant in history, Wordsworth still presents site of contradiction and debate. In Alan Liu's Wordsworth: The Sense of History, Wordsworth senses history as discontinuity and trauma, force that tears and breaks everyday being that it must suddenly be `thought' in first place (57), but in James Chandler's earlier working out of Wordsworth's affinities with Edmund Burke, poet evidences friendly feeling toward habit as second nature and toward history as cultural continuity and epistemological assurance. (4) As first move, and one that informs Liu's thesis, Chandler's position could make history in this sense compensation for and solution to experience of history as trauma. But it follows from recent article by Anne-Lise Francois, connecting Wordsworth's valuation of second nature with Hume's epistemology of custom and habit, that this solution harbors potential irony because of equivocal qualities of custom and habit. (5) Francois observes that Hume escapes from skeptical doubts entailed in his epistemology by adopting natural mode of thinking from common life, valorizing uncritical return to has been impressed by a slow process of familiarization, the cumulative significance, acquired over time, of things that may initially appear of little moment (142). While for Hume this process remains almost unconscious, is so continuous that it is not felt as change (153), and thus turns assimilation of authority into gentle force, revolutionary romantics like Wordsworth felt nervous about authority blindly admitted to power by this involuntary operation of memory, the capacity for unwanted, unconscious forces to invade and become part of inner life (159). …

Against Relativism: Cultural Diversity and the Search for Ethical Universals in Medicine, by Ruth Macklin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. 304 pp.

Ruth Macklin's new book, Against Relativism, says in its subtitle that it intends to address cultural diversity and the search for ethical universals in medicine. This it does very well. Every chapter includes some discussion of cultural relativism, cultural anthropology, or postmodernism, and her analyses are acute and scathing. Macklin is unabashed in her defense of the principles of medical ethics, and she gives a strong argument that principles are essential elements of any ethical system that is to successfully survive the skeptical doubts of relativism.

Skepticism and Possibilities

One skeptical strategy against A's claim to know that P is to hold that it is logically possible for someone to have the same base (a term needing explaining) for P as A does in spite of its not being true that P. Philosophical replies have focussed on showing that these are not genuine possibilities. Whether they are can be an interesting question of metaphysics, but it is argued in this paper that this metaphysical discussion is not the proper focus for an assessment of skepticism. Even if there are the odd logical possibilities, they do not suffice to warrant skeptical doubts. Rather, there has to be good reason to think that there is a genuine chance of the alleged possibility obtaining. This requirement cannot be satisfied generically, and that is' what is wrong with generic skepticism.

Scepticism and Ineffability in Plotinus

AbstractThe first part of this paper traces back to Plotinus a strategy applied by Augustine and Descartes whereby sceptical arguments are used to set aside sensualist forms of dogmatic philosophy, clearing the way for a dogmatism independent of sense-perception which is 'self-authenticating' and thus immune to, and even proven by, sceptical doubt. It is argued that Plotinus already uses this strategy in the opening chapters of Enneads V 5 and V 3. The second part of the paper argues that Plotinus' account of how the ineffable One is said (we do not actually say the One, but merely express our own affections) is inspired by the structure of sceptic discourse (the sceptic does not say things as they are, but merely expresses personal affections). Finally, similarities and differences between sceptic discourse about things and Plotinian discourse about the ineffable are explored.

How is Akrasia Possible After All?

I attempt to save akrasia from the skeptical doubt and denial as to its possibility in a new way. I argue that the akratic agent – the akrates – has unconscious reason(s) for the akratic action. Moreover, the akrates does not weigh and value the reasons for and against the akratic action in full awareness, including their emotive significance, consciously experienced as feelings. He follows his feelings favoring the akratic action (since he does not tolerate or resist them), and does not let his unconscious emotions, supporting the wanted, chosen action, play a causal role in impelling him to perform this action.

The Value of Mission Statements in Public Agencies

Many public management scholars have argued that defining a strong for public agencies is a useful step toward performance improvement. Public managers and elected officials have begun widespread adoption offormal statements to do just that. However, remarkably little empirical research has examined the case for or against statements. We looked at the statements of 304 public schools, with data about school characteristics and performance before and after the adoption of the statement. We asked whether missions vary across agencies doing the same work, whether some statements have an impact on performance, and whether the impact is positive or negative. Although skeptics doubt that talking about organizational is constructive, our results suggest that missions do vary substantially and that the choices that managers make in the content and rhetorical style of their statements can have consequences that facilitate or impair subsequent performance. Long a staple of corporate practice, statements are increasingly found on the walls and in the publications of public agencies (Ehrenhalt 1997). Define the agency's mission has become one of the few public management prescriptions warmly embraced by scholars of diverse disciplinary backgrounds, from rational choice to urban planning to law to public administration to human resource management to public policy (for just a few examples: Altshuler 1996; Senge 1990; Behn 1991; Wilson 1989; Miller 1992; Osborne and Plastrik 1997). It also has pervaded the 193/Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory We are grateful to the University of Michigan Business School for financial support for this research and for doctoral student support for Sandy Piderit; to Philip Kearney and Trevor Leutscher for access to the Integrated Database on Michigan Education; and to Milbrey McLauglin, David K. Cohen, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Jane E. Dutton, and the anonymous referees of this journal for helpful and constructive critiques and

The Sceptic's Burden

The basic thesis ofMichaelWilliams'book Unnatural Doubts is that sceptical doubts, at least of a Cartesian variety, are neither natural nor intuitive, but are, instead, the product of 'contentious and possibly dispensable theoretical preconceptions'. In particular, for Williams, scepticism arises because of a commitment to what he calls 'epistemic realism'. A fundamental thesis of my book Pyrrhonian Reflections on Knowledge and Justification is that scepticism (in its most challenging forms) is not based upon such prior theoretical commitments, but rather is the natural outcome of unrestricted exploitation of a feature already present in our everyday concept of knowledge. Specifically, our everyday epistemic practices contain a useful mechanism that raises the level of evidential scrutiny in problematic settings. However, in the absence of psychological constraints (as in Hume) or pragmatic constraints (as in Peirce), this mechanism can generate an ever-widening range of undefeated possible defeaters- and with this, radical forms of scepticism emerge.Scepticism is not the result ofmounting the wronghorse (as Williams thinks),but the result of riding a serviceable horse too hard. With respect to Williams'own contextualist response, it is not clear whether, in the end, he avoids or embraces a strong version of scepticism. He claims that Cartesian doubts arise in a particular context, namely, the context of pursuing an epistemically realistic programme. In that context, according to Williams, Cartesian scepticism is unanswerable. His central claim, I take it, is that nothing compels us to do philosophy under these contextual constraints. In arguingthisway,however,Williamsseemsto have adopted a strongversion of relativism of just the sort traditionally exploited for sceptical purposes. To the claim 'It is all a matter of context', the correct response is, 'It had better not be- at least if you are trying to refute scepticism.'Perhaps Williams can produce a strongly contextualist position that does not slide into scepticism, and perhaps his appeal- rather late his book- to externalist consideration is intended to do this.But just as it is unclear whether contextualism can avoid scepticism, it is also unclear whether externalism has force against sensibly stated (even very strong) versions of scepticism.

Ontology According to van Fraassen: Some Problems with Constructive Empiricism

This paper argues the case for ontological realism as against various present‐day forms of conventionalist, instrumentalist, cultural‐relativist, or anti‐realist doctrine. In particular it takes issue with Richard Rorty’s writings on philosophy of science – where these ideas receive their most extreme and provocative statement – and with Bas van Fraassen’s more moderate ‘constructive empiricist’ approach. This latter entails ontological commitment to whatever shows up through trained observation or empirical research. However, it refuses to countenance realist claims concerning the existence of (as yet) unobserved entities and their role in explanatory theories premised on putative laws of nature. I maintain that van Fraassen’s position is: (1) inadequate to account for our knowledge of the growth of scientific knowledge; (2) self‐refuting since often undermined by examples which he himself supplies; and (3) incapable of mounting resistance to other, more wholesale (e.g., Rortian) varieties of anti‐realist argument. Only by combining causal realism with a principle of inference to the best explanation can philosophy of science avoid these kinds of hyperinduced sceptical doubt.